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Anonymous Releases Restricted NATO Document
angry tapir writes "Anonymous has released a document marked 'restricted' from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The 36-page document, which is dated Aug. 27, 2007, appears to be budget and equipment outlays for what was termed a new 'HQ ISAF JOINT CIS CONTROL CENTRE.' NATO's press office could not be immediately reached. Anonymous claimed on its 'AnonymousIRC' Twitter handle that it has 1GB of material from NATO but said that most would not be published because it would be 'irresponsible.'"
It's an interesting idea that it would be 'irresponsible' to release these documents in full.
I call dropping bombs on innocent people in Afganistan irresponsible. I call killing one million people in Iraq for oil and dollar supremacy irresponsible. If you are going to use conventional, State / MSM thinking to restrict and control your actions, then apply this thinking evenly; the State is dropping bombs on people for the 'greater good' (to 'spread peace and democracy') and so releasing these documents for the greater good of preventing millions of deaths is completely justified and not at all irresponsible. It is in fact, the only responsible thing to do, since more people will be spared a horrible death for no reason, than could possibly be harmed by the release of the information.
That being said, the documents are under their control, they took the massive risk in getting hold of them and its entirely up to them what they do with them.
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"The Anonymous"?
If anything, it seems that this person/group acting under the guise of the Anonymous logo thinks it would be irresponsible. That doesn't mean that "The Anonymous" thinks that way. Because the next "Anonymous" hacking something might be someone completely different with a different set of morals. If any.
There is no "The Anonymous". When will people stop to act as if Anonymous is a hierarchic group of people, organized like an average crime syndicate or nation? But then, I shouldn't be surprised, after all "The Al Qaida" has been a staple of the terrorist craze for a decade now without anyone wanting to know that it's mostly a very loosely connected network of people acting. But they at least had a figurehead, Anonymous doesn't even have that.
And before someone starts crying, no, I don't equate terrorists with Anonymous, I just didn't find a better example. If you have a better parallel for an "organization" without a strict hierarchy, one that is an organization mostly by name rather than concerted, centrally planned action, I'll gladly replace it for that one. The only common ground I can see in Anonymous is a fondness for certain message boards.
Anonymous is by no means more a group than "the hippies" or "the hackers". Ok, maybe they at least communicate with each other more, I don't know for sure. The point is, yes, they have a more or less common definition of what's right or wrong, with even more lenient edges than the aforementioned groups maybe. I wouldn't even dare to say that they have a common goal. But there certainly ain't no entity that sets a policy or defines rules the others have to adhere to to be part of "The Anonymous". There is no code of conduct or a contract to sign.
And I wish people would finally realize that. You are not dealing with a homogeneous group of people. At best, you have a lot of individuals and groups that share maybe a more or less common ideal. And even that's something I'm rather unsure about.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's interesting if Anonymous is actually taking that stance about the docs. I understood they were being sarcastic. The documents should be published in their entirety or Anonymous would appear to support the militarist and secretive paradigm they claim to oppose.
Releasing secrets is often good, as many secrets just protect the asses of corrupt vested interests. But why do we see no releases of secrets from potential threats to free societies? Like China, various idiot countries like N. Korea, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc? Just sayin'...
Funny, whenever some talks about the bytes obtained rather than the number of documents, it tends to indicate that the information obtained was useless. Perhaps they found a 700MB Access file with the commercial ship traffic in the Atlantic Ocean.
Chances are it's not important what they found. NATO is a collection of countries with diverging view (e.g. Turkey&Greece, France&UK&US) and with a lot of attention-seeking military personnel who have been shunted to this multi-national effort. Anything juicy or of significance would have been exploited by internal personnel a long time ago.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Are people really this stupid?
Is that a rhetorical question?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I call killing one million people in Iraq for oil and dollar supremacy irresponsible.
I'm not sure that a million Iraqis have actually died in the conflict. Too damn many for sure, but I'm not so sure it's a million. In any case, you give the current and previous operators of this particular war far too much credit. Oil? Dollar supremacy? That would actually be some sort of goal. A terrible way to achieve that goal, but a goal nonetheless. Personally, I'm going for arrogance as the root cause of the war with a side order of finishing his father's business and the bullshit "stay the course" nonsense as to why it is still going on in another administration.
SSC
Maybe they got better security in place?
A lot of the Anon hacks seem to rely on simple SQL injection and other exploits. Could it be that these countries (aside of NKor, which probably is not connected to the internet at all) have better security standards in place?
They might not consider a budget that big of an issue when dealing with petty things like security.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I call dropping bombs on innocent people in Afghanistan irresponsible
Its irresponsible if they're being careless about where they're dropping bombs. It is not the agenda of the state to intentionally target innocents. Innocents are a casualty of war, most of the time.
to 'spread peace and democracy'
I'd say its more to maintain peace and democracy in the State. An extremist Muslim nation will never allow for peace and democracy in any of the nations that fall under "the State"
so releasing these documents for the greater good of preventing millions of deaths
How do you know what the documents are? For all you know, these are documents that contain the names, locations, and methods of access of the most important world leaders. I don't see how releasing a document that potentially puts more peoples lives in jeopardy would help save lives.
You do know that Anonymous isn't one grandly unified body, and that it's made up of individuals who may have slightly differing opinions to the rest? Why do they all have to subscribe to the groupthink?
Anyway, we're talking about Anonymous, not Wikileaks.
which is totally what she said
It's an interesting idea that it would be 'irresponsible' to release these documents in full.
I call dropping bombs on innocent people in Afganistan irresponsible. I call killing one million people in Iraq for oil and dollar supremacy irresponsible. If you are going to use conventional, State / MSM thinking to restrict and control your actions, then apply this thinking evenly; the State is dropping bombs on people for the 'greater good' (to 'spread peace and democracy') and so releasing these documents for the greater good of preventing millions of deaths is completely justified and not at all irresponsible. It is in fact, the only responsible thing to do, since more people will be spared a horrible death for no reason, than could possibly be harmed by the release of the information.
You're being very assumptive by saying releasing these documents would save lives they could just as easily get people killed. Don't get me wrong I support more freedom of information but neither of us have any idea whats in these documents.
I reckon Anonymous could turn out to be the modern Internet's worst enemy.
Before you flame me, hear me out.
Historically, first-world politicians have not really understood the Internet. What they have understood is that while it's a fantastically useful tool, it has aspects that (to society as a whole) are less desirable. Child porn is the obvious one that gets banded about fairly regularly, but by regularly hacking high-profile targets, Anonymous are practically guaranteeing that national security will also wind up on the political radar.
Many on /. will say "Well then, the likes of NATO should hire someone better to secure their networks" - and while there may be some logic to that, I can see a lot of politicians suggesting a rather different solution - one involving censorship and tracking people online. We pretend that the Internet is immune to much of this, but China, Iran and Tunisia have proven that this is not true.
What we have here is the technological equivalent of a bunch of kids causing a great deal of disturbance in their school lunch hall - and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it dealt with using the age-old technique of "If we can't figure out who the troublemakers are, we'll instigate a bunch of new rules which inconvenience everyone."
I call killing one million people in Iraq for oil and dollar supremacy irresponsible.
I'm not sure that a million Iraqis have actually died in the conflict. Too damn many for sure, but I'm not so sure it's a million.
You're probably right. Figures vary a lot but most of them are far below 1 million. Only the "Opinion Research Business Survey" reports more than 1 million deaths. The controversial Lancet survey reported 601,027 deaths while the extremely well-confirmed minimum figure of Iraq Body Count lists 101,906 civilian deaths. (Notice that Iraq Body Count only counts cases with multiple sources of evidence from the international press, though. So the actual number of deaths is very likely significantly higher and could be well in the range of the Lancet survey.)
However, there doesn't seem to be any reliable source about violent deaths of Iraq military combatants. I've seen estimates ranging from ten thousands up to several hundred thousands, but nobody seems to know for sure.
Anyway, considering all the evidence, it seems likely that less than one million people died in Iraq as a result of the US intervention. (not taking into account the first Gulf War)
trying to find morality in war is quite futile: so to say that dropping bombs on "innocents" is bad, sorta seems like saying dropping bombs on non-"innocents" is ok. none of it is good. but that is why we call it war and avoid it at all costs (if we can). unfortunately, _some_ people won't listen, and they need the motivation of bombs to get them to the negotiating table.
jp
There might only be one person who did the hack and has the documents. Maybe that one person has a conscience.
Releasing secrets is often good, as many secrets just protect the asses of corrupt vested interests.
But why do we see no releases of secrets from potential threats to free societies?
Like China, various idiot countries like N. Korea, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc?
Because those secrets are not in English. So it's harder to find them. You need Chinese speaking people to enter those systems. Even if their servers are linux or windows based, still you need to know where to look. So you think you can just download a user directory, or download all word-documents. True, but you still need to be on the right server. And then, if you have those documents, you need to translate them to English, to gain the attention of the West.
All those non-latin languages, forget about it if you cannot read them. English is still the language where it all happens.
A few points:
- If hacks rely on social engineering, or even being able to understand what a page, for example, an admin page, is saying to figure out whether there's something you an exploit there, then language may be a massive barrier. Then even if they did leak it their Western audience wouldn't be able to understand it. It's challenge enough trawling through a dump of Western documents when you know the language to spot something important, let alone in a foreign language. Let those who know that language deal with that.
- The West is much more interested in documenting things because it believes it's the right thing to do in terms of accountability, but then never follows through on releasing said documents in response to controversal incidents and covers it up anyway- effectively it often becomes a box ticking exercise, to say "We're transparent and accountable". Other nations like Iran, North Korea etc. just drop the charade and don't even waste their time pretending to be accountable/transparent, or at least don't bother digitising everything
- There have been some foreign leaks, IIRC anonymous grabbed about 10,000 Iranian interior ministry files or similar not so long ago.
- These hackers are really mainly just interested in cleaning up their own backyard first- they're sick of government encroachment on their lives, or government spending their tax dollars on wars the citizens of said nation don't really agree with etc. and want to deal with that primarily.
I call killing one million people in Iraq for oil and dollar supremacy irresponsible.
I'm not sure that a million Iraqis have actually died in the conflict.
It's not just the armed conflict; the sanctions count too. Madeline Albright famously didn't challenge the figure of half a million children killed by the sanctions alone, so although nobody is sure about the figures one million is probably on the low side.
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Why would a hacker in New Jersey or Finland care about the penalties for violating Chinese state security?
Nah, there isn't even the most remote possibility that the released documents will initiate any conflict. Thing about it, if script kiddies can download these documents, the really interested parties can get them as well. Most probably China, Iran etc. already have them. NATO might even act on assumption that they are no longer secrets. They are only hiding them from the general population of their own countries out of fear that it will expose their dirty laundry.
releasing these documents for the greater good of preventing millions of deaths is completely justified and not at all irresponsible
How will releasing these documents prevent millions of deaths?
If they find some document that proves that there is some great conspiracy to engineer wars to increase defense contractor profits or something, I'd say that would be something to release. On the other hand, how is publishing the operational budget for the construction of some base somewhere going to prevent millions of deaths. Do you think the leaders of NATO nations are going to say "whoa - our line-item for $20k in toilet fixtures has been leaked to the world - let's change our foreign policy!"
Wars happen because elected leaders issue orders to pursue them. All NATO does is drop the bombs. I doubt there is some document that shows that innocent people were deliberately targeted/etc. Most likely the best you'll find is some map that labels a building as weapons factory and it turned out it was an orphanage or whatever. Besides - anything actually dealing with targeting decisions is probably classified way beyond the stuff that Anonymous got a hold of.
And for the record, I'm all for having less intervention overseas, and fewer long-term engagements. Leaking military operational information isn't likely to change that, and may just end up getting people killed. The wars are started by politicians, so that should be the focus of reform.
The problem with your examples, all but is very vague, is that there are at least two sides to every story.
In the case of your specific claim, I am quite sure that NATO does not purposefully target innocent people in any country. If anything it is because it is so uncommon for them to kill a large number of innocent civilians that it gets so much press. The greater good is not always about "spreading peace and democracy" ... the greater good can be also removing the ability of a specific aggressor to continue their ways.
So it is not completely justified to releasing all documents. Some yes, but not all. We read the results of the Afghan dump which revealed sources of intel and such, was that responsible? I think not.
Your openly declaring that there is no reason behind the deaths caused by NATO. I say there is justifiable reason, it all comes down to. Are we protecting a greater good. Yes there are going to be accidental deaths and those are to be regretted. But does the possibility of accidental deaths excuse of from acting to prevent hundreds if not thousands of deaths?
Tell me, when does it become responsible to ignore genocide or mass murder? How many have to die before its not irresponsible for NATO or America to act? I am curious as to the limits. We ignored hundreds of thousands of Africans dieing in the 90s, we do it even to this day for the most part completely glossing over the violence in Sudan and Ethiopia. We seem quite content to ignore the hundreds dieing in Syria and no one bats an eye at what goes on in Lebanon.
Flame on, I have karma to burn. Strawmen and hyperbole are all you are.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
'AnonymousIRC' Twitter handle that it has 1GB of material from NATO but said that most would not be published because it would be 'irresponsible.'"
I often wonder if the real reason they don't post these documents is that they are simply not interesting. Lulzsec and Anonymous are both quick to say that they've hacked into servers, and as they've shown, they've been very good at exploiting holes. However, they seem to be finding holes into low level information, and the "scandal" they find is generally nothing more than mundane information. Do you recall Chinga La Migra? They released tons of personal emails against the Arizona police department, and the only thing that these emails showed is that they were a pretty normal operation, including the fact that this department, too, hires idiots who like to send chain mail through email. So in the end, they found a few gigs of unprotected email, bragged about it, and never bothered to realize that this wonderful treasure trove of information was essentially trash. At best, they created harassment for the officers who, as far as the documents show, weren't involved in anything illegal. The most damaging release of information so far has been usernames and passwords of a porn site, which only exposed the dangers of having the same log in and password information for multiple sites.
Restriced should be just as secured as Classified, Top Secret, Über Top Secret, etc.... in that only those two should see it are allowed to see it.
Why have more than one security scheme. Have one that works and use it.
The wars are started by politicians, so that should be the focus of reform.
I used to think that too. I was really upset at Bush during the buildup to the Iraq war because I thought he was pushing us into a war that no one wanted.
Then I looked around and realized the truth: most Americans actually wanted to invade Iraq. Some of it was because of Bush's convincing (or shall we say, deceptions?), but if you remember the poster from those days, "no blood for oil!", one American commentator said, "some people will answer that with, 'why not?"
In other words, if you want to end war, start by convincing people around you. Then politicians will have no power.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you have a better parallel for an "organization" without a strict hierarchy, one that is an organization mostly by name rather than concerted, centrally planned action, I'll gladly replace it for that one.
How about sports team fans? I hear Yankees fans gather in message boards, declare a unifying ideology, and even have a logo/banner that they identify themselves with, even in public. There are several official clubs, and spokesmen often issue their rants and decrees on a network of blogs and twitter accounts. They are like a multi-headed hydra. You can try to stop some of their leaders, but other Yankees fans will just pop up to take their place!!!
NATO RESTRICTED is about the same level as For Official Use Only in the US. You don't even need a security clearance to get access.
the extremely well-confirmed minimum figure of Iraq Body Count lists 101,906 civilian deaths. (Notice that Iraq Body Count only counts cases with multiple sources of evidence from the international press, though
Only the population of the town I live in? Well that's OK then!
I really wish anti-war idiots like the one you are replying to would get with the program and start protesting the most realistic numbers, as it would shut off this ridiculous line of debate where some faux rationalist like you starts debating precisely how dreadful the event is, and implies--whether you mean to or not--that if the best estimate is "only" 10% of the estimate given by the maximally outraged nitwit that they should only be 10% as outraged.
"Faux rationalist" Have we read Foucault or some other French bullshit philosophy lately?
Personally I find such political debates boring because they tend to be dominated by people like you who apparently can't read (or don't want to) and just invent accusations and insults out of the blue against anyone they suspect might not fully share their world-view. A reasonable discussion of topics like wars should be based on accurate data.
While there is no doubt that "more deaths are worse than fewer", it isn't a cardinal scale. A million is not ten times worse than a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand isn't a million times worse than one.
While this might be a popular statement, it is still very silly and in a straightforward decision-theoretic sense irrational. I suspect (only modest pun intended) that such sentiments are a by-product of the frequent exposure to Hollywood movie scripts and (in academia) of "trolley-case" ethics.
The big shame is that there are no accurate figures and the most accurate ones are hand-collected by a bunch of volunteers.
Just for the record (not that my opinion matters in any way): I was and am decidedly for the First Gulf War and was and am decidedly against the Second Gulf War. So. Now all the world knows it. I do have some beliefs that do not fit neatly into the standard left/right dichotomy.
You may print out my political opinion now, frame it, and hang it over your bed as a token of the power of independent thinking based on real data over mere political opinion, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking.
Yes, I do believe just that. Going into Afghanistan (and, to a greater extent, Iraq) was stirring the hornet's nest - it became a staple of Islamist propaganda that "Western crusaders have come to fight Muslims in their lands", which, by Islamic law, requires that all able males should join the jihad until the invasion is repelled. God knows how many people who'd otherwise stay home they manage to recruit on those premises.
In addition, Taliban itself, while extremist, was directed mainly inside the country, not outside, with the exception of Pakistan. I don't know if their leaders had some long term plan of "world-wide Caliphate", but pragmatically they were clearly busy with making an "ideal" Islamic state on the territory that they had controlled; so they were not direct enemies of the West. Once they were attacked, their rhetoric has changed towards "fighting the great Satan" worldwide - and now every Taliban member is a potential suicide bomber.
Quick reminder - laws are for governments and large organisations to keep the peasants in order. Did anyone get prosecuted when the french bombed the Greenpeace boat, killing people? No.
The countries which make up Nato can do what they like, when they like.